Custodians:

Welcome to Public Bake Ovens

Why bake ovens? Over the years, CELOS has found that these small brick or cob structures bring forth delicious pizzas, bread, and new friendships. They are also a magnet for stories of distant places, for community gatherings, and -- more recently -- for regulations. The following sections present the stories, photos, journal entries, newspaper articles, policies, and other documents that CELOS has collected about bake ovens.

Toronto Bake Ovens

Toronto boasts a number of permanent bake ovens in neighbourhoods across the city. Most are in public parks, although a few are on private property. Each oven has a different story of how it got built and who built it, and each has its own unique programs. All of the ovens on the list below share the goal of being a public resource.

In 1995, Dufferin Grove got the first outdoor oven located in a Toronto park. Jutta Mason had that idea as the result of watching this little
film at the Toronto Reference Library in 1994. The film was made in 1983 and it's mostly about trains and port wine in the Douro region of Portugal. Near the end (at 35.10 minutes) there is an eyeblink scene about a communal bake oven in a small northern village, revived at the urging of a radical priest. Dufferin Grove Park is in a neighbourhood that has a lot of Portuguese immigrants. An outdoor, communal bake oven seemed like a good thing to try here....read more

Bake ovens can be powerful!

Nov.6, 2018: Shauna Kearns comes to bake at Dufferin Grove Park, and to tell her remarkable story of working with bricklayers at the Trade Institute of Pittsburgh (TIP) to help people coming out of prison to build bake ovens for sale:

Portable Tandoor

June 26, 2011 CELOS purchased a portable Tandoor. The tandoor spent several years at Thorncliffe Park's R.V.Burgess Park, until the park got its own tandoor. Then CELOS brought the tandoor back to Dufferin Grove and continued lending it out from there. Read more...

In 2011 there were eight or nine outdoor bake ovens in Toronto, only a few of which were used regularly throughout the year. The goal of the guest baker project was to learn what assets and challenges each oven has. Each story comes from a baker visiting and baking in the oven, often at a community event where the bread was then served. The process of arranging an occasion and actually baking unfolded according to the characteristics of the oven, logistics of baking, and politics that surrounded it. We hope that our findings help the future use of ovens as well as the building of any new ones.
We created a chart from the guest baker project here: Bake Oven Chart

A note from the main guest baker (2010-2011)

Since the first day of my visit to Dufferin Grove Park, I have been in love with the ovens in the park. Ovens are not exactly a part of the Japanese culture I come from, but I have always aspired for one, a wood-fired oven.

Here at the park, the bakers taught me by doing, and I learned by doing. That is the way we decided to do our research.

An outdoor oven is really a wonderful thing to have, and I hope that more people and communities benefit from building one. --Yo Utano

The first guest gig was on Dec.4 at Riverdale Farm, for their annual "Home for the Holidays" event. Yo was the baking assistant to Jeff Connell, and there was a preparatory meeting at Jeff's new restaurant, The Woodlot. Then as Yo visited each oevn she wrote up the story. You can find out about Yo's experiences at the links at the top of this page.

Here is a youtube post that Yo Utano found, called Uzbec cuisine. Cooking with fire, in all its glory!

Temporary Bake Ovens

Bread and Puppet oven from the front

Our original inspiration for temporary ovens was the work of Bread and Puppet Theatre, who have been doing what they call "cheap art" in New York, Vermont, and many other countries since the 1960's. Their performances always involve puppets and bread, and when they are not at their farm with their own ovens, they build ovens with whatever materials come to hand.

"Show on the Road" Ovens

In 2007, as part of the "Show on the Road" grant, CELOS helped run pizza events in other neighbourhoods using a temporary bake oven. The links below connect to each of these events.

Those ovens were basically a box made of bricks piled on top of each other, with one side left open. Once all the materials are taken to a site, it takes about an hour to assemble the oven. The design was meant to create the simplest oven possible, so that people could enjoy the experience of baking on a brick hearth in their neighbourhood without (or before) going through the much more involved process of building a permanent oven.

The City of Toronto put in a new oven at Christie Pits last spring. It was purchased from France, and by the time it was installed it had cost the city $161,000 -- way higher than anything built before. By October 2016 it had only been used 5-6 times, so the cost to the city per pizza was pretty high :-)

To counter the idea that outdoor ovens are complicated and expensive, our group (CELOS) held an outdoor winter cooking lab for which we built an unmortared oven in between snowstorms in December, using found materials (mostly stacked bricks). In addition to what we were able to scrounge, we paid $17 for a piece of cement board for the hearth base and $89 for a ceramic fibre insulating blanket. On January 4, three ex-Dufferin Grove bakers used it to make pizza, sourdough bread, scones, pita bread, roasted vegetables, and ghee, all from the same firing. The quality, as far as we can see, is very good. read more

Most recent bake oven regulations and rules

2015

December 2015, Christie Pits: engineer's stamp rule

It appears that Parks management has made a new rule -- that all ovens must have an engineer's stamp. For this reason, only small pre-stamped pre-fab ovens have currently been approved for installation. Publicbakeovens recommends that community groups not try for such ovens, since they don't work well in public spaces.

This has not been stated directly, but the evidence seems to be there. For example, at Christie Pits the original oven, which was in good repair, was removed from its place in the fall of 2015 and placed at the side for apparent disposal. After some discussion, the oven was put back beside the footings for a new prefab oven. See Christie Pits oven correspondence.

Sequel, 2016:

In the case of Christie Pits the new oven was not small (although the actual hearth size was not much bigger). But the oven was imported from France and a large housing was made for it, Final cost: $161,000.

2016

March 2016, Dufferin Grove Park

New rule: when there's a fire in the ovens, they have to be blocked off.

Reason: so that no passerby or child can jump inside. (Note: in 21 years of oven use, there has never been an injury to the public.)

Effect: On a bread baking day, the bakers have to tend each oven around 10 to 15 times per oven and per firing. That amounts to 20 to 30 times per oven per firing for the two ovens. That adds up to 40 to 60 times of the bakers moving the barricades on Wednesday and 40 to 60 times on Thursday. In addition to that they have to set it up - moving 2 heavy barricades to position them in front of each oven, and afterwards to put them away again.

Note: this new rule appears to be modeled on the Riverdale Farm oven rules. That oven no longer has public use.

barrier at smaller oven

barrier at larger oven

Sequel: summer 2016

The city carpenters devised rather ingenious gates, made of wood, with nice hinges in a barn style. The barriers could themselves catch fire if there were sparks (which there are not), and during baking the gates are left open to give the bakers access -- which means that when there's an active fire in the oven, anyone could still put their hand in the fire. Happily, people don't do that, not before and not now. And the wooden barriers look so much nicer than the metal ones.

Bakeoven Policy

August 2011:

September 2011:

The proposed bake oven policy does not adequately reflect the range of requirements that would foster community use.

Bake ovens can be used for private events like birthday parties, but they need some expertise (more than a BBQ). More commonly, bake ovens are used for a long list of open-to-everyone, community-based events (make-your-own pizza days, community suppers, potlucks, food preserving workshops, community baking, City councillors' community picnics, etc).

The success of community initiatives depends on:

- a) Collaboration with PFR staff. The amount of involvement from PFR staff would vary depending on the needs of any given community, from simply helping access water, kitchen space and bathrooms, to providing oven scheduling assistance, to providing staff. There needs to be clear language in the policy that supports collaboration.

- b) No fees for open-access community events, small as well as large. Open-access community-based initiatives are exempt from user fees in the proposed user fee policy here. If this exemption is ignored, fees will discourage involvement by smaller groups and individuals who are donating their time to provide a service to their communities.

- c) Coverage from the city's insurance. As open-access community-based park activities, these events should be covered by the city's volunteer insurance.

September 2011: This e-mail was sent to each member of the parks committee:

Friday Night Supper

Click to enlarge.

School Visit

Dear Councillor,

Now that last week's bake oven item at Parks and Environment has been deferred (thank you!) until your next committee meeting, could a couple of us come and see you with a little 15-minute presentation one day next week? We'd like to show you some pictures and a 7-minute video of bake oven users' commentary.

We'd also like to show you our alternative way of gaining revenue for the City through City-supported community use of bake ovens. At Dufferin Grove Park, during the last three months, bake ovens helped bring in over $35,000 ("everyone-welcome" pizza days, farmers' market bread baking, Friday night community suppers). All of this revenue was put back into the park programs: CELOS Financial records. We want to make sure that the City's bake oven policy explicitly enables such community uses, not mainly private birthday parties.

May we come and see you some time in the week of Sept.26 at a time that suits you? (I'll follow up this e-mail with a phone call to your staff.)

Here's our earlier response to the city's bake oven policy. It's in the same format as the policy so that the two documents can be compared more easily. Our approach was to maximize community oven use and stress the need for a collaborative relationship between City staff and bake oven users. This version was not accepted by staff and therefore not considered by the Parks Committee.

Follow-up, two years later (2013)

When City Council approved the new policy on Dec.1, 2011, they called for a detailed follow-up report from the PFR general manager two years later:

"City Council direct the General Manager, Parks, Forestry and Recreation, in collaboration with the community representatives, local stakeholders and councillors, to report back to the Parks and Environment Committee two years after implementation of the policy on how the details of the permitting, fees, construction and operations are working."

We have asked the Parks and Environment Committee whether this report has been scheduled for the December 6 meeting of the committee. No answer.

Note: the new oven installation policy prohibits building bake ovens near ice rinks. That makes the Dufferin Grove and Scadding ovens illegal.